A few weeks ago during a talk hosted at the Institute for Economic Affairs, I picked up a pamphlet written by Lawrence W. Reed of the Mackinac Centre about the life of Thomas Clarkson, a man who, in the late 18th Century, campaigned in print to ban the slave trade. While characters such as William Wilberforce or T.B. Macaulay may be more widely recognised for their role in outlawing this vile business, it was Clarkson who in many ways provided much of the intellectual ammunition. (His name is probably not greatly known and the first thing that sprung to my mind was whether he was the ancestor of British motoring journalist and TV personality Jeremy Clarkson.)
Clarkson wrote an essay for a prize at Cambridge University, and chose to write on the subject of slavery — then a booming industry enriching many a Briton. For the remainder of his life, he campaigned tirelessly, sometimes even to the point where his own life was put in physical danger. But as we know, victory was eventually secured.
Why do I mention this tale? I do so because it is fashionable amongst a certain type of person to decry the importance of ideas, of individual campaigners against injustice and oppression, and to claim — with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, of course — that slavery, and other monstrosities, only declined because of economic or other forces. But even though there is some truth in ascribing changes to these things, as this Wikipedia entry accepts, it still requires the energy and commitment of actual people to force the pace of change. We do not know, for instance, how long slavery might have persisted under the British Empire had people like Clarkson not bothered to campaign against it. It is fair to assume, however, that it ended a good deal sooner than otherwise and hence millions of people probably owed what freedoms they had to people such as this fellow.
It is sometimes a bit depressing to be a libertarian in a country where freedoms are being stamped on as they are at present but frankly I have no time for self-pity, and stories like that of Thomas Clarkson are an inspiring example of how good people with ideas in their heads and fire in the belly can make a difference. Clarkson is a great British hero.
But wouldn’t “the market” have taken care of slavery?
Isn’t political activism like Clarkson’s just more nanny-state interference with free enterprise?
No, we don’t know, but we can guess that the rise of industrialisation would have killed it off quickly. Industrialisation removes the economic advantage of slavery. To be fair, though, it has been pointed out the the living and working conditions of “free” wage labour in the non-slave states of the US were generally little if any better than those the slaves had to put up with.
If market economics are so great, you’d praise the idea of letting trade deal with it, ignore the work of Clarkson et al., and wait for the free market to render slavery obsolete because that would be the most efficient way. If slavery needed people like Clarkson to end it, or at least to end it markedly quicker, maybe the market isn’t the best solution after all.
EG
Slavery still exists. Industrialisation did not kill it off.
That took a moral imperative on the part of Clarkson , Wilberforce etc. And the global enforcement of the ban by the British Empire to just scale it down to the point where it looked like it had gone away.
It took a civil war to end it in the USA , and they were indusrial enough already to fund and fight the first modern war.
Think Nazi Germany . Think Soviet Russia. Think China and North Korea. Think muslim sub saharian Africa.
Gone? Not likely! And certainly not from market forces.
Why pay for what you can get for free.
Why are there no blockbusting movies about the abolition of slavery, but loads about its vile operation?
Because it alters the given wisdom that it was all our whitey western fault and had nothing to do with the Arabs or the black africans who captured and sold the slaves in the first place.
RAB beat me to it.
Let me mention that there is more to slavery than the assumed chattel variety. Also, I believe there is still chattel style slavery in Mauritania. Someone else may know better.
Also falling mostly into the chattel category, small in numbers but high in news reports (probably for prurient reasons) is the sex slave industry.
I think most on this site would agree that informed consent is necessary for a valid contract, and yet, throughout the world, people are trapped into loans or bonded labor without prior knowledge or understanding. This is usually done by businesses so tightly bound to corrupt governments as to be indistinguishable. These government would have to be described as fascist.
Some, by certainly by no means all, child labor involves slavery. Whether we like it or not, the world is full of places where parents can and do sell their children into bonded labor. My opinion is, if the child is capable of going into the work force usefully, then it is beyond the parents right to sell that labor (and keep the income).
We should also keep in mind as liberty espousing individuals, that the conditions that force many cases of servitude without exit clause, are a product of corrupt governments. One can look closely and say ‘that person needed money to buy food. They borrowed it and now must pay it back.’ Yet when we step back and look at the bigger picture it becomes clear that it is government that is creating the situation. Usually for the benefit of members of the government.
Unfortunately, I think many products wind up in the first world with either the direct or indirect addition of some type of slave labor. We have no thorough provenance on anything but the final assembly phases.
I think RAB is spot on. Let’s not get too busy patting our own backs.
Jonathan Pearce’s praise of Thomas Clarkson is well made as is RAB’s point about the difficulties of ending slavery.
“If market economics are so great, you’d praise the idea of letting trade deal with it…”
No I wouldn’t. The problem with slavery was not inefficiency but legal and practical denial of liberty. To leave the market to deliver an ‘efficient’ solution in time would come at the cost of continued denial of liberty to people in slavery. A moral right to liberty is slight if it is not universal.
Also, I believe there is still chattel style slavery in Mauritania.
And Sudan, too. Inadvertently encouraged by some western charities who buy slaves in order to emancipate them, thus supporting the market.
Debt-bondage, often heritable, survives in large parts of the world, as does forced labour, where people contract for employment but discover that the conditions can be arbitrarily varied and the bargain is worthless. It often happens when people go abroad, where they have no support networks, and sometimes being a foreigner deprives one of rights and remedies available to natives. Trafficking for prostitution is the special case that gets most of the publicity, but domestic servants and labourers also suffer.
EG,
…maybe the market isn’t the best solution after all.
As I’ve written here and elsewhere before, we should support free markets because they are free, not because they are markets.
Economic efficiency is not a goal fit for humans. That centralised decision and control cannot on any scale work as efficiently as local markets in allocating resources, is only a side-effect of what’s objectionable about it. An unforced deal makes two out of two people happier, always. A third-party telling the same actors what to do, makes that third party happier, but makes the experience of those involved irrelevant. They are, to use a term from Marx, alienated.
But wouldn’t “the market” have taken care of slavery?
Isn’t political activism like Clarkson’s just more nanny-state interference
The slaves who were captured and shipped to the Caribbean/USA were hardly free actors in a contract, were they?
If market economics are so great, you’d praise the idea of letting trade deal with it, ignore the work of Clarkson et al., and wait for the free market to render slavery obsolete because that would be the most efficient way. If slavery needed people like Clarkson to end it, or at least to end it markedly quicker, maybe the market isn’t the best solution after all.
Euan, markets do not operate in a vacumn, but within a moral order. I do think that the spread of laissez faire capitalism played a part in ending slavery, just as it helped to undermine apartheid in South Africa, for example. But that is not the whole cause. Slavery was, after all, protected by law for many centuries. To change, the law had to change.
We should support free markets not because they are markets, nor because they are free, but rather because the circumstances necessary for a free market to operate are beneficial – personal liberty, the rule of law, etc. These liberties are more important than the liberty of the market, and where there is a conflict then the liberty of the person should prevail.
Since there will inevitably be conflicts, the market can never be entirely free. Neither, of course, can people ever be entirely free, so there is an eternal juggling of competing liberties.
Yes, but I’m not convinced that’s the whole story. It’s good to have a choice of electricity suppliers, for example, but where is the benefit if the competing providers collude to raise prices? In the absence of regulation, they can do that and get away with it, because people need electricity. Or car insurance – it’s expensive because you have to have it from someone, therefore there is a lesser incentive for suppliers to compete. Make it voluntary and it would be a lot cheaper, but other costs would rise.
EG
We should support free markets not because they are markets, nor because they are free, but rather because the circumstances necessary for a free market to operate are beneficial – personal liberty, the rule of law, etc. These liberties are more important than the liberty of the market, and where there is a conflict then the liberty of the person should prevail.
One can support the market both on freedom grounds and on consequentialist grounds. The market is just a short hand term used to describe the networks of voluntary agreements that prevail if people are left free to make them. That’s it.
It may be in your philosophy, but for everyone else “the market” means “the capitalist economic market.” The non-economic bits are generally called something like “society.”
EG
Euan, whatever.
Don’t you ever give up?
EG,
[…] because the circumstances necessary for a free market to operate are beneficial – personal liberty, the rule of law, etc. These liberties are more important than the liberty of the market, and where there is a conflict then the liberty of the person should prevail.
I thought that was implied by “because they are free”. I see free markets as a special case of a more general freedom. I don’t advocate a “liberty of the market” distinct from the liberty of its participants.
Not until I get answers 🙂
EG
I think Guy has answered you, Euan. And rather well, too.
Mr Clarkson was indeed a “good man who made a difference”.
The “social forces” explination for change is greatly overstated.
In many ways “social forces” are like “market forces” – just lots of people making choices.
As for technology (the “forces of production” for Marxists) many wildly different societies in history have had the same technology.
Technology (itself the result of human action) helps us do things. But it is does not dertermine whether we will have slavery or not (for example slavery died out in Iceland without any change in technology) or whether we will have serfdom ( for example the Friesians who did not practice serfdom did not have different methods of farming from people who did).
In the end the choice is in ourselves – not in our tools.
OK, just wanted to express my dismay that “A good man who made a difference” wasn’t referring to Don Knotts.
Though I’m sure Thomas Clarkson was a good man too, even if I can’t recall any of his movies.
There is slavery in the classical sense still in the world that is undeniable and it is a bad thing, there is another form of slavery however. I fully expect to be ridiculed and derided for what I am about to type.
We are all slaves. Even those who are unemployed and live on benefits are slaves. We’re all conditioned to be good little consumers and feed the economic monster that is the free market. We go out to work to earn money to buy food, pay our rent/mortgage, put clothes on our backs and buy all the useless baubles that distract us from the dire state that the world is in. We could provide all these things for ourselves without having to be a part of the economy at all. think ‘The Good Life’ but taken all the way. Growing our own food, hunting game for meat and skins. building a house with our bare hands from hand cut wood and stone. We could do this but we don’t. We’ve sold ourselves into slavery for the sake of convenience.
In this context (and not in the traditional view of slavery) I would rather be a slave and told as much, than be a slave and told I was free.
Let the mocking commence.
Mandrill.
Hello Mandrill, my name’s Ug. You know, 4th cave along from you?
I hear you’ve invented a square wheel.
Can I have a look!
Could be as revolutionary as that new fangled social cooperation and trade they’ve thought up down on the plains….
Mandrill, ahh…
?
Hhmmm……
I’m a little confused. I think you’re a lot confused. See, I’ve tried almost all of those things you’re describing as ‘not slavery’. Trust me, they are WAY more work than just getting a job.
And they are more ‘slavery’ too. For example, have you ever tried milking a cow? Yeah, it’s easy the first time (snort) but the problem is, you gotta do it again. And again. And again. Every day. Twice a day. Rain or shine. Hot or cold. Even on Sunday real early after that party (that you won’t have the time for) the night before.
And building a house with your “bare hands”? How many houses have you actually built? I’m at three. And I cheated and used many labor saving devices. Like a power saw?
And I’d like to see you hunt deer on foot. How fast can you run? Oh. You’ll make a bow and arrow. I know of people who’ve done that. Not easy. But it could work. (Slight eye roll)
See, we don’t feed the market. The market feeds us. Before you go dreaming all that stuff, let me recommend you try it for yourself, but on a small scale first. Because you won’t have enough time to support even one of you alone. You’re going to need to cooperate with other like minded primitives. Oops. There’s that ugly market went and reared it’s head.
Hhmmm……
(Shakes head) Was that for real? Poor guy must have been staring into a computer too long. I know what that feels like.
Mandrill, I won’t mock you. You are in fact a rather good example of the kind of moron who gets paid megabucks to write slightly more articulate pieces for the Guardian. I am sure you can get a slot there and pay for your course of medical treatment at the same time. Give them a call!
If market economics are so great, you’d praise the idea of letting trade deal with it, ignore the work of Clarkson et al., and wait for the free market to render slavery obsolete because that would be the most efficient way. If slavery needed people like Clarkson to end it, or at least to end it markedly quicker, maybe the market isn’t the best solution after all.
That is a bit unfair, Euan. I did actually acknowledge in my original article that economics could and probably did play a part in undermining slavery in the long run. As economies mature and industrialisation kicks in, it may indeed make certain practices obsolete. But not even the most ardent defender of laissez faire would claim that capitalism inevitably drives out things like slavery unless there is also a corresponding change in how people ethically treat their fellows.
After all, if slavery is enforced by people who use brute force against other people, that is not really an example of capitalism, but gangsterism. The decline of slavery was ultimately about the triumph of civilised law.
In any event, even though industrialism did help kill off slavery, there is no harm and much good in accelerating this by the actions of folk like Clarkson. Call it a win-win outcome.
Okay, if I’m not a slave why do I feel like one?
“After all, if slavery is enforced by people who use brute force against other people, that is not really an example of capitalism, but gangsterism. The decline of slavery was ultimately about the triumph of civilised law.”
In other words “If you don’t work you will be punished.” The punishment may not be a beating but living on the dole (as I have done), The whole “New Deal” farce, and the way people look at you if they know you’re unemployed is still a form of punishment, in other words using force. That is slavery, its just wearing nicer clothes. I don’t think I made it clear that this might not necessarily be a bad thing, I just think that we should stop deluding ourselves.
None of the political/economic systems that are in evidence today or that have been used in the past can make anything any better. You all talk about freedom and liberty, bandying about your socio-economic theories when you don’t see that we all live in a cage.
You want to take apart the machine? Well don’t just sit there typing about it. Put your money, livelyhood, politics and philosophy where your fingers are and bloody well do something about it. Otherwise you’re no better than Blair and his cronies saying “We know we’re right, we don’t have to prove it to anyone.” If you’re so right, if you’re so sure, make it happen.
Tear it down. The current system cannot be beaten by words, or by buying the right things at the supermarket (buying things at a supermarket, HAH!), it cannot be changed from within. It must be destroyed totally and utterly, the ground salted and seared, and something new built somewhere else.
You want your world? Well I want mine too. Though I’m willing to admit that I might not be right. You want me to live in your world? Prove to me that its better, that it works.
Sorry, got a bit carried away there. You know six months ago I wasn’t quite so angry. can anyone reccommend a therapist?
Okay, if I’m not a slave why do I feel like one?
Who knows? To be serious, maybe you are actually very depressed. A lot of us who work for big firms – as I do – can feel entrapped and wonder how the hell to get out. A lot of us, though, manage to make the switch. My wife has just left her well-paid job for a big U.S. company and started her own, and having the time of her life. And that is not a delusion of hers. It is real.
The current system cannot be beaten by words, or by buying the right things at the supermarket (buying things at a supermarket, HAH!), it cannot be changed from within. It must be destroyed totally and utterly, the ground salted and seared, and something new built somewhere else.
You sound like Joe Stalin after a few big vodkas. Actually, the world is a pretty big place, and I am sure there are some lovely parts of it to accomodate folk who want out of the liberal, capitalist order. Why not make the jump? There’s nothing to stop you. Send us the occasional postcard.
There is nothing to stop me? You have no idea. Escape is all well and good if you can afford it, I can barely afford to pay the bills.
I’m not depressed I’m just angry.
Angry at being lied to constantly.
Angry that my child may growup in a world where freedom and justice are just words.
mandrill,
Angry is good. At least it’s a lot better than depressed.
Years back I was trapped in a cubicle. I escaped in a very scaled back version of the primitive route you propose. It helped if for no other reason than physical fatigue eases the mind. I didn’t have a child to care for.
I don’t have an answer for you. In the UK, it seems your government may have turned the corner on ever being held accountable. In the US, at least for now, I’m far more optimistic (less pessimistic?) than that.
Maybe look around and see if you can move to another country. Maybe you’re trapped by assets. When I get in the frame of mind your in, I imagine walking away from it with just the clothes I’m wearing. That thought works for me, but you have a child to protect.
Don’t know what to say. Hang around here and maybe something will begin to happen. I think that’s what I’m doing.
mandrill, I hope you are okay and can sort things out in your life. you do sound in quite a state. I hope you do not think my remarks patronising, but good luck.
Nice one Mandrill !!
I jest clicked on your tag a got a web site called Under constuction.Doesn’t anyone else round here check these things?!!
The yolks on us. But feel free to drop around. Lose the kid though. A tad to much.
Um, oh God, I just went back and actually read some of his stuff.
I think he thinks, he’s on our side!
Try again. If two similar posts show up in a row….
I went to Mandrill’s site just after my last post. It looked good so I decided to come back as soon as I got back.
I did. He’s great. I left a comment there. At least I think I did. It seemed to disappear into nowhere. Kinda like my first try at this comment.